The Web-based application, developed by a team of 80 Eclipse and Deloitte engineers, is offered hosted or in-house and costs about A$75,000 (US$57,500) for businesses with up to 300 employees and A$140,000 for larger companies, with an additional 20 percent fee for a hosted service.

Williams said while the program operates within client infrastructure, Deloitte hosts a Wiki, blog and an RSS Aggregator offering innovation information, and ongoing technical, training and resource support.

"Ideas can be posted by anyone regardless of their location, within about 10 minutes; [Innovate] divides their ideas into internal ideas (for internal business changes) and business ideas, which can be debated, expanded and linked to similar concepts to highlight those with most potential," he said.

The program runs on J2EE open standard Java and is marketed by enterprise content management vendor Vignette Inc. which will showcase the tool in its Vignette Village Asia-Pacific conference in October this year.